Work Text:
.How was your nap?
.Nnnmmmnnnnnnnnnnn. What year is it?
.17774.
.Funny, I thought my shift didn't start until 18400.
.Yeah, but something came up.
.Hm?
.We got a message. Not from Earth.
.Holy shit. From space? Is this first contact?
.Don't get too excited. It was the word "fart", ASCII-encoded, repeated sixteen hundred times.
...
.As best as we can tell it came from the direction of the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, a 21st-century space probe. And no, we don’t know how it woke back up.
.Space probes aren't supposed to do that...?
.Humans aren't supposed to be immortal, either, but here we are.
.All right, what’d you wake me up two hundred after my shift ended for?
.All-hands-on-deck vote.
.What for?
.Remember the Fart Signal?
.Are they really calling it that now?
.It's not like the "Wow signal" was any better named.
...Point.
.We got more. From a different direction. Several hundred megabytes' worth, to be precise. From someone who claims to be Pioneer 10.
.What.
.That’s not even the best of it. The entity calling itself 10 is sapient, and has proposed that we print another antenna array to allow for “quantum communication without lightspeed delay”. Sent us a CAD file of what they meant and everything. Vote’s being called to see what we’re actually going to do about it. You’ve probably already gotten a couple emails on the issue.
.Fuck, my inbox is full of vote-yes/vote-no spam already. I’m not awake enough to sift through all of this. Can you tl;dr it?
.Sure, I’ll try.
Yes wants to try it out. It’s a configuration the evolutionary algorithms had discarded because it’s a single island of potential in the center of a whole lot of nothing. And, I mean. Quantum communication? If this works, we could ask this 10 individual how the hell they found it. The science staff hasn’t found anything obviously malicious, just a bunch of what we would’ve called inefficiency.
No thinks that we’re being phished by aliens who might have reverse-engineered our technology, that we should spend more time studying this weird antenna design 10 sent us to make sure it isn’t going to blow anything up, and/or that someone in Communications is fucking with us.
Vote’s starting in a couple months to let everyone catch up on the times. Some of ‘em haven’t been awake since the 8000s, they don’t know what the hell’s going on.
.Ha. That’s what they get for signing up for the longsleep schedule.
...I was planning on swapping myself to the longsleep schedule before this happened, actually. 10K years between awakenings stops sounding so freaky once you’ve been alive for longer than that.
.I’d prefer to experience at least 20% of the time I live through, thanks.
.I mean, these people were told that space contains a whole lot of nothing and it'll be a few million years before we get to Alpha Centauri. And you’ve been spending most of your awake shifts doing what, sitting on a pad with your eyes closed? That doesn’t sound like experience to me.
.It’s called meditation.
...Well, let me know if you want to meet up for lunch while we’re both up.
...So we’re supposed to believe that after all our time failing to achieve AI, a bunch of space probes with the collective computing power of a toaster just... woke up? Just like that?
.I mean, we tried telling them they were impossible, but it sorta bounced off. I’m guessing that’s not how it happened, but it’s at least an explanation, and to them a fairy story probably feels better than not knowing.
.I guess I don't blame them for not believing us, then. Anything else?
.The Juice one has been babbling about football all day. Apparently they’ve got the same sort of connection set up with Earth.
.I did wonder what had happened to everyone we left on that rock.
.Still immortal, still post-scarcity, still playing football.
.How can you even make football stay interesting over 15,000 years?
.You would barely even recognize it anymore, to be honest. We’ve already got a couple videos and podcasts on the local ‘net. They’re pretty wild.
.Have we tried making contact with Earth through these guys yet? Do you know how they’ll react?
.All I’ll say is, I can’t wait to see how they’ll react to what we made out of laser tag.